Social Media in the Enterprise

Social media, if harnessed well, has the potential to improve customer service, get customers involved in the development of products and services, reduce marketing and customer acquisition costs, make customers advocates and brand ambassadors and open new sales channels on the revenue side and help engage and train people internal to organisations. Here I try to list some of the trends, opportunities, challenges and 5 steps to look at if you are thinking of social media as I am. You are welcome to add your experiences as you deem fit.

What should we know about social media?

Social media is an ubiquitous many-to-many rich media communication & engagement platform for socially connected people or wannabes. The social and network impact of networked media is becoming mainstream thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and so on. Version 1.0 of social media has been to digitise networking in many of its slices and dices predominantly focused on making connections, staying connected and using the connection for rich people-to-people engagement. It is not surprising to see why communication leading to engagement is at the heart of all digital revolutions we have seen so far. We saw it with the email, e-groups to Facebook, web1.0 to web 2.0 and so on.

Social media sits at the intersects of all these revolutions with the central idea that people and NOT a device is at the center of the network. That idea lends voice to individuals, flattens the social hierarchies and enhances the potential for harnessing social capital in day to day life. Social networks have existed for philanthropic, common interests, social, cultural, ethnic or religious reasons where belonging played a large part but such physical networks were always bigger than the individual. In its digital equivalent, the individual is larger than the network throwing open a set of possibilities hitherto unavailable.

In physical networks, meeting places and events define context, boundaries and purpose and were often limited physical constraints. Proximity between community members made communication and engagement real, shared, purpose driven and time bound. Body language and tones of voices lend personalities to interactions. But rarely did physical networks lend all community members an equal voice or level playing field in the interactions – something virtual social networks have turned on its head. The virtual equivalents of these important enablers for social connectedness come with its own opportunities and challenges. Digital traceability is just one of them.

Emergence of Social Media 2.0

If Social Media 1.0 was about making connections, staying connected and using the connection for communication and engagement, Social Media 2.0 would be about deepening people-to-people integration to richer people-to-process integration and vice versa towards specific call to action involving social capital. People-to-process integration has the potential to reach enterprise class functionality for a variety of applications once the implications of the network effect is understood in core business processes such as sales, marketing, innovation and customer service.

Physical Networks

Social Networks 1.0

Social Networks 2.0

Characteristics

Shared Values, Event driven. Network larger than the individual

Shared Forums: People to people communication & engagement

Shared Social Capital: People to process integration & engagement

Network enablers

Belonging, shared experiences and beliefs, social position & hierarchy

Social networking in the enterprise work on the principle that the engaged stakeholder influences and more stakeholders. Avatars of network marketing are the closest examples we can get to in terms of what corporation are attempting to do with social networks for customer engagement, brand valuations and so on. Despite the pitfalls of network marketing, customer retention and customer advocacy has remained core values in both worlds. Advocacy isn’t free. Advocacy is an outcome of a relationship that is nurtured. Happy customers are often good advocates. Alternatively incentivising advocacy is an option but fraught with the risk of eroding social value quickly. Then there are some unique challenges.

First of all without an event or common interest you are left with the challenge of defining the ‘connection’ or ‘purpose of engagement’ amongst a mass of initially unconnected people. Once connected the challenge is to feed the purpose like any relationship. For companies the reason why a stakeholder ought to join your social network needs to be explicit and hence the need to state that upfront. Engaged stakeholders then need to be enabled and empowered to influence their networks with positive reinforcement of the brand, product, or experience.

Secondly, gate keeping assumes a different responsibility. Impersonation is difficult to monitor. Easily addressed by requiring stakeholders to register or use existing credentials with a firm but the balance between using social media for crowd sourcing to expand current customer base versus filtering authentic stakeholders has to be determined upfront.

Thirdly, text, images, audio, video and emoticons replace interpersonal interaction and not always conducive to kid glove a high value customer or to silence a vocal customer or a vandal. In many cases interactions that tend to go beyond a ‘connection’ are those that have an offline experience. At the same time the ubiquity of user generated content that is possible with the proliferation of recording devices on the social networks can pose threats to company image if unmonitored and unchecked.

Fourthly, social network interactions leave a digital trail that can attract social and legal consequences for the firm and its community members. For the former, this fear prevents information sharing. For the latter it prevents active engagement. In many cases this challenge is counter-intuitive to the purpose of social networks which is that information begets information and people beget people where sharing information and experiences is the norm.

Fifthly, when people see social networks as a one from a corporation they would expect the same level of experience interacting with any of the other channels of the company. So companies need to be prepared to treat their social networks as any of their other digital channels requiring 365x24x7 attention.

Five steps to harnessing Social Media in the Enterprise

Identify core business processes that have very high people to process engagement. For example, the online booking and check-in process of an airline, or a bank transfer utility of an online bank.

Identify areas within the core processes where dividends can be gained by exposing parts of the processes to a social network. For example, expose a test marketing exercise of a product or a service launch to a social network and solicit and measure specific feedback.

Clearly articulate the value to the company and value to the stakeholder in terms of savings, efficiencies and value. Clearly identify how the value can be measured and realised. i.e. institute a bonus value add to current offering for referring a new customer or for solving an R&D problem via the social network.

Articulate what a social network enabled business process would look like and model it around the value propositions. For example, design a business process for campaign management with specific social networking value propositions and interaction models that are specific, measurable and time bound.

Lastly evaluate implementation of the business processes using tools and look at what technologies and tools fit into the organisation structure, business processes and operations. i.e. make sure that the business value is articulated, business processes are defined before technology selection is embarked on. It is prudent to start with a proof of concept.

Part of the reason many companies struggle with social media is that the fascination of the technology tools grips and overshadows business purpose. Technology has to be the last in the list of things to do – a lesson painfully learnt but forgotten easily from the dot com era.